ts of
machinegun fire, but our dead seemed scarce in the places where I
walked.

Victory? Well, we had gained some ground, and many prisoners, and here
and there some guns. But as I stood by Montauban I saw that our line
was a sharp salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping sharply
southward to Fricourt. O God! had we only made another salient after all
that monstrous effort? To the left there was fury at La Boisselle, where
a few broken trees stood black on the skyline on a chalky ridge. Storms
of German shrapnel were bursting there, and machineguns were firing in
spasms. In Contalmaison, round a chateau which stood high above ruined
houses, shells were bursting with thunderclaps, our shells. German
gunners in invisible batteries were sweeping our lines with barrage
fire, it roamed up and down this side of Montauban Wood, just ahead
of me, and now and then shells smashed among the houses and barns of
Fricourt, and over Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of "hate." Our
men were working like ants in those muck heaps, a battalion moved up
toward Boisselle. From a ridge above Fricourt, where once I had seen a
tall crucifix between two trees, which our men called the "Poodles," a
body of men came down and shrapnel burst among them and they fell
and disappeared in tall grass. Stretcher bearers came slowly through
Fricourt village with living burdens. Some of them were German soldiers
carrying our wounded and their own. Walking wounded hobbled slowly with
their arms round each other's shoulders, Germans and English together.
A boy in a steel hat stopped me and held up a bloody hand. "A bit of
luck!" he said. "I'm off, after eighteen months of it."

German prisoners came down with a few English soldiers as their escort.
I saw distant groups of them, and a shell smashed into one group and
scattered it. The living ran, leaving their dead. Ambulances driven by
daring fellows drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a healthy place,
and loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a tunnel there.

It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and shambles. But was
it Victory? I knew then that it was only a breach in the German bastion,
and that on the left, Gommecourt way, there had been black tragedy.

VIII

On the left, where the 8th and 10th Corps were directing operations, the
assault had been delivered by the 4th, 29th, 36th, 49th, 32nd, 8th, and
56th Divisions.

The positions in front of